Plan B for the Middle Class by Ron Carlson Page A

care for him at all and was with me now, but—everybody knows—when a woman acts that way it makes you nervous. The kid Gleason was a sharpshooter, a sidearm fastballer who could have struck me out with two pitches, and he had shaved Billy with two laser beams that cut the inside corner.
    Gleason’s third pitch was the smoking clone of the first two and Sunny Billy Day, my old friend, my former roommate, lifted his elbows off the table just like he had done twice before and took the third strike.
    It was a strike. We all knew this. We’d seen the two previous pitches and everybody who was paying attention knew that Gleason had nailed Billy to the barn door. There was no question. Eldon Finney was behind the plate, a major league veteran, who was known as Yank because of the way he yanked a fistful of air to indicate a strike. His gesture was unmistakable, and on that dark day last March, I did not mistake it. But as soon as the ump straightened up, Sunny Billy, my old teammate, and the most promising rookie the Pirates had seen for thirty years, tapped his cleats one more time and stayed in the box.
    â€œWhat’s the big jerk doing?” Polly asked me. You hate to hear a girl use a phrase like that, “big jerk,” when she could have said something like “rotten bastard,” but when you’re in the stands, instead of running wind sprints in the outfield, you take what you can get.
    On the mound in Bradenton, Gleason was confused. Then I saw Billy shrug at the ump in a move I’d seen a hundred times as roommates when he was accused of anything or asked to pay his share of the check at the Castaway. A dust devil skated around the home dugout and out to first, carrying an ugly litter of old sno-cone papers and cigarette butts in its brown vortex, but when the wind died down and play resumed, there was Sunny Billy Day standing in the box. I checked the scoreboard and watched the count shift to 1 and 2 .
    Eldon “the Yank” Finney had changed his call.
    So that was the beginning, and as I said, only a few people saw it and knew this season was going to be a little different. Billy and I weren’t speaking—I mean, Polly was with me now, and so I couldn’t ask him what was up—but I ran into Ketchum at the Castaway that night and he came over to our table. Polly had wanted to go back there for dinner—for old times’ sake; it was in the Castaway where we’d met one year ago. She was having dinner with Billy that night, the Bushel o’ Shrimp, and they asked me to join them. Billy had a lot of girls and he was always good about introducing them around. Come on, a guy like Billy had nothing to worry about from other guys, especially me. He could light up a whole room, no kidding, and by the end of an hour there’d be ten people sitting at his table and every chair in the room would be turned his way. He was a guy, and anybody will back me up on this, who had the magic.
    Billy loved the Castaway. “This is exotic,” he’d say. “Right? Is this a South Sea island or what?” And he meant it. You had to love him. Some dim dive pins an old fishing net on the wall and he’d be in paradise.
    Anyway, Polly had ordered the Bushel o’ Shrimp again and we were having a couple of Mutineers, the daiquiri deal that comes in a skull, when Ketchum came over and asked me—as he does every time we meet—“How you feeling, kid?” which means have I still got the crippling heebie-jeebies. He has told me all winter that if I want another shot, just say so. Well, who doesn’t want another shot? In baseball—no matter what you hear—there are no ex-players, just guys waiting for the right moment for a comeback.
    I told Ketchum that if anything changed, he’d be the first to know. Then I asked him what he thought of today’s game and he said, “The White Sox are young.”
    â€œYeah,” I said.